Every House Needs a Balcony (22 page)

When they returned home from the hospital, she said that if they didn't start looking for another apartment, she would take Noa and move in with her sister. He told her she could start house hunting.

“Pity it cost me two years' worth of health,” she said, and turned her back on him when they went to sleep.

This is my substitute, this is my pardon, this is my atonement, this rooster goes to death, and I shall enter a long, happy, and peaceful life.

Together my sister and I held the atonement chicken above our heads, swinging it round and round under the watchful eyes of our mother, who made sure we didn't miss a word of the prayer that accompanied this ritual.

“Any minute this chicken is going to shit on my head,” I yelled at my mother.

“You should only be so lucky,” she replied. “It's a sign of good fortune.”

“But I don't want anyone to shit on my head, not even your stupid chicken,” I fumed.

My parents always fasted on Yom Kippur. They never cheated, not even once. Even in the worst
hamsin
heat waves,
they didn't let so much as a drop of water past their lips, and they certainly didn't brush their teeth.

Dad went to the Sephardi synagogue, and Mom to the Ashkenazi synagogue.

Dad announced that his prayers this year were going to be a whole lot more meaningful and heartfelt because we were on the verge of turning over a new leaf. After all these years, Dad had been granted permanency at the Autocar factory where he worked as a guard, and he decided that the time had come to get out of Wadi Salib. He was very disappointed with his party and its attempts to quell the race riots and wanted to provide us, his daughters, with a change of scenery, since everyone knows that a change of place brings a change of luck. We moved school too that year, but this was mere coincidence. The authorities, which had no idea how to handle race riots, decided to transfer my sister's class from the Ma'alot Hanevi'im school to the Amami Aleph school. Since no plans were afoot to transfer my class, Mom went to the authorities to explain that it was absolutely out of the question to separate me from my sister, since we spent all our time together, and were actually more or less up each other's backside. The authorities refused, and Mom threw a temper tantrum and made it clear to them that in that case, the older one wasn't going to transfer, either; it was both of them together or neither one of them. In fact, they should put us both in the same class. Only after I explained to Mom that I wasn't such a genius as to justify moving me up a year
did she agree to relinquish her demand to have us both in the same class, but she was adamant about our attending the same school. The school gave in and agreed to my mother's deal in order to keep my sister, a straight-A student and a credit to the school.

So we moved house after Yom Kippur. From a one-room apartment on Stanton we moved to an airy three-room rental for which my parents were required to pay an initial key-money deposit; quality of life for the girls.

My dad took out a mortgage, Mum took the rummy, and we moved to Hadekalim Street in downtown Haifa.

Mum opened wide all the windows to let in the air from all directions, and the stench that immediately filled the apartment was absolutely unbearable.

Hadekalim Street, despite its fancy name, was on the edge of the garbage dump belonging to the Turkish market, which was actually located in the courtyard of the building adjacent to ours. In other words, Mom and Dad had bought an apartment right in the middle of downtown Haifa's shit-hole. They told us apologetically that it was the only place they could afford—and even that required a key-money deposit—because it was cheap.

“It's true,” my mother recalled, “the windows were always closed whenever we came to examine it thoroughly before deciding on improving our girls' quality of life.”

It was the filthiest, most stinky street in Haifa, and we never again went down to play. There was nowhere to play.

The only good thing about Hadekalim Street was, again, our balcony.

The balcony overlooked Jaffa Street, downtown Haifa's main thoroughfare, the street where everything happens. Most of the action took place right opposite our balcony. There was a coffee bar there, although it was more like a saloon, and it was there that all Haifa's lowlife, seamen, and whores congregated to play backgammon all day, drink arak, and have fights. Twice a week they'd break up all the chairs and tables, until the bar discovered plastic furniture.

And every night until late, or until all his stock was sold, the Bulgarian
burekas
man stood at his stall on the sidewalk in front of the café, where, with amazing dexterity, he would slice the
burekas
in two or four sections, peel a brown hard-boiled egg, sprinkle a little salt and pepper on top, and hand it all in a cardboard container to the happy customer.

Right next to the café several stores sold cheap household goods and cleaning materials and stalls piled with duty-free clothing from abroad, smuggled in by seamen and sold cheap on the street until the next police raid. And there was also the delicatessen with the nonkosher salamis and real Bulgarian cheese and all kinds of delicacies that came from abroad and were sold dirt-cheap on Jaffa Street opposite our balcony. From all over Haifa people came to do their shopping downtown, from the Carmel, Hadar, and Ahuza neighborhoods, as well as from the outlying towns, known as the Kiryas.

My sister and I spent hours on end sitting on the balcony at a small table that served as a reserve dining table when we had guests, watching the strangers below and speculating about their lives.

After school we stayed at home, reading books, and my sister continue to educate me in the ways of the world: Keep your mouth closed when you are eating; walk with your head up and your back straight so you don't get a hump; place a book on your head and pull your neck upward as if you can feel someone pulling you up by the top of your head; don't roll your R's, so as not to emphasize that you are Romanian. Swallow them.

Don't swear.

Don't be rude.

Don't spit.

Don't kick.

Smile politely, enigmatically.

Don't look people straight in the eye, even if you are dying to do so; lower your eyes humbly. Stop looking at the world with that judgmental expression on your face.

Say little and learn to listen, because most people in the world have more to say than you have, until you grow up.

These were my sister's ten commandments.

But most important, the most important thing of all, is to be special, to be different from everyone else. No one in my class knows anything about me, no one even knows where I live, and no one knows what my parents do for a living.

I am a complete mystery to them.

“Of course, it's because you're ashamed to say,” I said to my sister, and she replied that it's her choice not to say.

In the 1960s, when everyone wanted to be like everyone else and look alike and not be different or stand out, because they wanted Israeli society to be homogeneous, Sefi chose to be different because she understood that different is special.

Sefi attended the prestigious and snobbish Reali High School. When it was her turn to go down to the grocer's store, she made a point of dressing nicely so that if she bumped into someone from her school they would think that she was just passing, same as they were.

Unlike me, my sister never went down in shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops on her feet; she really made an effort to look as if she was going out on the town. Even Tova and Malka, her childhood friends, were made to swear not to tell anyone in their class where she lived. The whole class, including the teachers, knew that Sefi lived in Hadekalim Street, but they were all certain that Hadekalim Street was a nice street lined with palm trees in the Carmel neighborhood.

And my sister never put them right.

When anyone asked me the way to my home, I used to say, “Just follow the smell, you can't miss.” And again my sister said that because I'm pretty I could allow myself to say whatever I like.

“So what?” I said to my big sister, who thought that she was merely wise. “You're pretty, too.”

But my mother knew how to take advantage of my natural talents, and when she went to the market, she forced me to go with her. According to my mother, when the greengrocer sees a pretty girl, he gets confused and gives her the best produce and even a discount. The butcher used to give Mom free food for our dog; whereas were it not for my coquettish smile, he would have sent her packing empty-handed. She didn't dare force Sefi to go with her to the market because she didn't think her smile was flirtatious enough. Besides, Sefi would certainly have refused to go because she spent all her time doing homework, so that she could be top of the class in the prestigious Reali High School as well.

The best gift I was given from my life in Wadi Salib was the ability to get along in life.

Sefi was given inspiration.

 

For six years we lived in the lowest and dirtiest street in Haifa.

When Sefi grew sick and tired of Hadekalim Street, with the Turkish market touching the port, she explained to my dad that if we didn't move house immediately, I would turn into a streetwalker, even though I attended the Leo Beck
High School, since a girl of my age needs company and the only company in the vicinity were those downtown losers. “And she is already that way inclined,” she added.

Dad became stressed, persuaded Mom to take an even more enormous mortgage before I turn into a loser, and we moved to Hapo'el Street in the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood, opposite the Tamar cinema, where that Nazi usher had taunted Dad by refusing to let him in to see
Oklahoma!

Sefi and I then experienced a rebirth, and were no longer ashamed of our neighborhood and our Romanian heritage. On the other hand, there still wasn't much for us to boast about.

They put their apartment up for sale, and she started doing the rounds of realtors in Ramat Aviv. To exchange a roof apartment in Rishon le Zion for a four-room apartment with no balcony in Ramat Aviv, they would have to add twenty thousand dollars. She told her husband that they could make do with three rooms, but he insisted that he needed a study in which to do the extra work he was obliged to bring home. To her surprise, his parents agreed to the necessary sum, and his mother told her over the phone that she had never understood how they had survived so long in a place that was so cut off from civilization. At long last, after a two-and-a-half-year wait, they finally received a telephone line, which made it possible to respond to potential buyers. After seeing a variety of properties that were above their budget, she walked into an especially neglected four-room apartment and managed to bargain the price down to a sum
that would leave them with five thousand dollars to fix it up and another three thousand to cover the mandatory betterment tax.

Her husband agreed that the apartment, with its open vistas on all sides, had loads of potential, but that renovation would cost them much more money than they had.

She persuaded him that they would repair only where absolutely necessary, and they bought the apartment; at the same time they sold their roof apartment to a very nice Argentinean couple. The entire transaction was negotiated and finalized within three months.

When she went to the betterment tax office to check how much they were required to pay on the apartment, the clerk told her that they were entitled to a tax exemption for one apartment, since her husband was a new immigrant. He calculated the price of the new apartment and showed her the total of three thousand dollars they were required to pay.

“And how much betterment tax are we supposed to pay on the Rishon le Zion apartment?” she asked the clerk.

“You don't have to pay,” the kindly clerk explained to her patiently. “You're exempt from paying on one apartment.”

“Still, how much is the betterment tax on the Rishon le Zion apartment?” she asked again.

The clerk calculated the cost of the apartment they had bought three years before, subtracted, added; raised the interest, multiplied by a third, and arrived at the sum of one thousand dollars.

“Is that the final sum?” she asked him.

“A thousand dollars,” he said. “That's the sum, but I must repeat that you are entitled to a tax exemption on one apartment.”

“Good,” she said to him. “So I shall now pay you one thousand dollars betterment tax on the Rishon le Zion apartment, and I'll take the exemption we're entitled to for the new apartment.”

“Suit yourself,” said the kindly clerk, and she went home thrilled at having in one instant earned a new kitchen for her new home.

She then called Kushi, who was a Jerusalem building contractor, and asked him for a quote for breaking down walls between the kitchen and living room, between the living room and the extra room, and between the bathroom and the small balcony.

“In Barcelona you quarreled with me because our living room was too big, and here you want to enlarge the living room?” said her husband, who objected to knocking down walls.

“You're right,” she said. “I'm inconsistent. Nothing I can do about it, I'm a woman.”

“And how much does Kushi want for the renovation?” he asked.

“He told me not to worry,” she replied.

“I am extremely worried when I am told not to worry,” her husband said, and she agreed with him, except when it concerned Kushi.

Kushi came down from Jerusalem with three workers, who worked on the apartment for a full month while she wandered about freely under their feet, happy that for the first time she was able on most days to leave Noa in a day care center, except for the days they had to spend in the hospital.

Her husband had joined a well-known firm of architects and, to her joy, left the entire renovation project in her hands. Her sister came over and offered architectural advice that she immediately adopted without telling her husband that these were her sister's ideas.

Kushi brought some weed, and between smoking and breaking down walls, they sat back and examined the results, rolling about laughing. She began to feel that she was getting her life back and even agreed to go out a couple of times, galloping over the sand dunes in Kushi's truck, letting the wind dry away her tears. She loved the platonic relationship she shared with Kushi, who brought back to her those feelings she'd had as a girl.

“Why do we lose our minds when we get married?” she asked him as they watched the waves on a wet winter's day.

“I never lost my mind,” he replied. “I only ever do what I want to do.”

“OK, you have that prerogative,” she said, meaning that it was also because he was a man, and because he made a lot of money as a building contractor, and especially because—thank God—he had two healthy daughters and a wife to raise them with unbounded love.

She told Kushi that she had forgotten how she had once been. “Nowadays, everything I do, I have to consider if it'll please my husband or not, and I don't like what I've become. I don't even know what kind of work I want to do. I don't want to go back to the boring drawing board that never suited me in the first place, and I don't know what I should do with myself.”

Kushi, who as usual had the knack of explaining things to her about herself that she hadn't known before, told her that she decided to study architecture at the school for architects only because her sister had studied architecture at the Technion. “I've never understood why you thought you were less talented than she is,” he said, and added that as a profession architecture suited her sister but not her.

They finished the work after a month, and she loved what she saw. The small apartment had transformed into a single large space. Of the original three bedrooms, only two remained, theirs and Noa's. The bathroom had become a kingdom in its own right once she had joined the small balcony to it, and after the walls had been tiled with local marble, the room took on a Mediterranean look, with clean and simple lines.

“How much do I owe you?” she asked Kushi, and he replied that it was a gift from him to Noa.

When she insisted, he agreed to accept only the cost of labor, which added up to the sum she had budgeted for in the first place, but what they had now was a spacious apartment beautifully designed in the best of taste.

She told her husband about Kushi's gift, and he found it strange that she had agreed to accept something like this from a friend. She told him that anything regarding Kushi could never be construed as strange, and went on to tell him that Kushi had offered—when she was eighteen—to make her a gift of her baby, so she wouldn't have to have an abortion.

“What do you mean, your baby?” he asked suspiciously.

“I told you that I got pregnant by my first boyfriend, Israel. Well, Kushi, who was an officer cadet with the Paratroop Division at the time, offered to marry me so I could keep the baby and then divorce him whenever I wanted. He thought I really wanted that baby, and what he offered was financial backing so I'd be able to raise it. If you ask me, that gift was much more special than this one,” she told her husband.

“And why didn't you accept?” her husband asked.

“Because Kushi was wrong. I didn't want Israel's baby. You're the first man I ever knew that I wanted to have a baby with.” Her husband hugged her and lifted her in his arms as they entered their new bedroom. Afterward he whispered to her that the renovation had come out extremely well. He said it in Spanish, to avoid making mistakes in Hebrew.

She loved the new apartment even though it didn't have a balcony. She especially loved the fact that there were lots of beautiful parks in the area where she could spend afternoons with Noa; and her sister and mother now lived close by. She felt that now—just maybe—after two and a half years, life was once again smiling on her.

She went for a job interview at the International Bank and was accepted. She wanted to work with people and still be home in the afternoons with Noa, and she had to work only two evenings a week. When she asked her husband to stay with Noa two evenings a week, he explained that he'd only recently started in this new job and he couldn't very well leave at three thirty in the afternoon, so she hired a young student, who fell in love at first sight with Noa, and felt quite safe when she left for work in the afternoon.

The bank manager was aware of Noa's condition and didn't bother her when she had to take her to the hospital for tests or treatment.

She advanced quickly in the bank, and within a year she was already behind a desk in the stocks and bonds department. She decided that Kushi was right; it was quite likely that she, and not only her sister, was successful.

In the bank she had several regular clients who insisted on dealing only with her; and then there were also those who pursued her passionately. She rejected them all, but admitted to herself that she felt once again like a woman. Flattered that she was desirable both in her job and as a woman, she was unable to share her feelings with her husband, whose professional success had fallen short of his expectations when he arrived in Israel. She tried to suggest subtly that he might consider switching to another profession, as she had done, but he insisted sharply that he had spent five years studying the profession he loved and had no intention at this
stage of giving it up. A profession, he said, is not an apartment that you can change. Why not? she asked.

One evening she asked him if he regretted that they had immigrated to Israel, while in Barcelona people who had studied with him were advancing at a much greater pace. He replied that he liked living in Israel, and that his time would also come, one day. But he was visibly upset by the fact that her sister was on the verge of success, and her highly impressive presentation had earned her a commission to design the Kodak building; she watched as her six-feet-tall husband shrank in stature before her very eyes. In their married life the cracks began to widen, as if in a badly renovated building.

She enjoyed his parents' annual visits to Israel, when he allowed himself to relax. She was the perfect hostess and often invited his sister and her family to join them in family meals.

On one of his parents' visits, his mother asked her if she wasn't thinking of having another baby. She looked at the older woman in disbelief and told her that Noa needed all the time she could devote to her. His mother tried to tell her gently that in her opinion, she should be open to other things too.

Her own mother used to look at her sadly and then at Noa and sigh, her look saying, “I am here for you, my daughter.”

This is the way you raised me, her eyes responded to her mother.

In the mornings she always arose early to cook Noa's lunch, because she wanted her daughter to eat fresh food every day. She did the laundry, hung it out to dry, woke Noa, dressed and fed her, made her a sandwich, took her to her nursery school, and then rushed off to work. At the same time, her husband would wake up reluctant to go to work and spend half an hour in their lovely bathroom. On the few mornings that she wanted him to get up early and get Noa ready for nursery school, it was so difficult to wake him that by the time she arrived at the bank, she was tense and angry. In the evenings, she laid into him for spending all his time in his study, seeing only to his own affairs and not taking into consideration that there might be all kinds of other things to take care of in the house, including a little girl who would benefit from having a story read to her at bedtime, to help her development.

“I don't read Hebrew well enough,” he said, knowing that she was actually referring to the fact that her brother-in-law read each of his daughters a whole book every evening, even though the younger one was only six months old.

“All right, then, you do the dishes, and I'll read her a story,” she would suggest to him, but when she saw the piles of dishes still in the sink at eleven o'clock at night, while he was still in his study, she attacked them angrily, deliberately making as much noise as she could, so as to disturb him. He would stomp over irately, asking what difference it made to her if he did the dishes at one in the morning, and she'd
reply that it would then be altogether impossible to wake him up in the morning.

“What do you want from me? Just ask for whatever you want,” he would say feebly in the end.

“I shouldn't have to ask you to do things. You should be able to see for yourself what needs doing and what doesn't,” she would say.

“What am I asking of you already? That you tell me what it is you want me to do to help you?” he'd repeat.

“That's just it—you see it as helping me, while I want you to share the work with me and not have to wait for me to issue orders. It's embarrassing,” she said in Hebrew, and he asked her what “embarrassing” meant. Noa started crying, and she didn't want the child to think of herself as a burden.

She particularly loathed asking him to take Noa to the hospital in her place, because she too couldn't absent herself from work too frequently. There was a limit, after all, to her boss's patience in the matter. He told her that at his job he had to inform them at least a week in advance, and he really didn't like doing it. She really didn't want Noa growing up with parents who were constantly bickering over who had to do what.

At least her parents' quarrels had always been around her father's squandering and her mother's fear that there would not be enough for the girls' dowry. She had married her husband because she loved him, so why the hell did she have to feel as if she was his sergeant major, delegating chores all day long? Why couldn't he decide for himself what he had to do?

“Maybe we should get divorced,” she suggested.

“Why?” He was shocked.